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Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny (2016)
- ugh123 3y agohttps://archive.ph/3FLF8 https://archive.ph/3FLF8 Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642
- bartread 3y agoI read this article perhaps two or three years ago and it's one of the reasons I always had a slightly negative view of Sam Altman because he comes off as just slightly insufferable (that whole Bronze Age sword sequence, for example). I don't necessarily think that was absolutely without merit: one tires of CEOs and SV types who think too much of themselves and don't attribute enough of their success to simply being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people (not to entirely discount their undeniable talents and abilities, of course). I wouldn't necessarily say the past few days have radically altered my view but I do find it striking that so many OpenAI employees broke cover to come out in support of him. It's certainly given me pause for further reflection and underscored that you just don't really know someone from simply reading about them, or reading interviews with them. So much of our understanding of individuals comes from spending time with them and from non-verbal cues. Still, I've known others who have done things similar to the Bronze Age sword thing and, overall, I don't recommend these stunts: you inevitably come off as out of touch and a bit of a tool.
- mymusewww 3y ago[flagged]
- stillwithit 3y agoAgreed. Most LARP observed speaking norms (how many CEOs have you worked under who all sound the same; hacking our biological feedback loops with platitudes and euphemisms, “billion dollar industry to claim for ourselves!” babble) and rely on old money networking, paying engineers to model data; they lack skills to create net new and schmooze with old wealth. IMO Sam is one of those CEOs. He’s knows the semantic games, but his list of novel accomplishments is as long as my dogs, who also just follows along with elders demands. Really not all that impressed. OpenAI employees look even worse now, concerned with network access via one of the billionaires classes Special Boys. Sam once Tweeted we’re all stochastic parrots, incapable of knowing where we’re going or whether it’s worthwhile to go there. Admission enough to me he sees things as pointless pageantry to exploit.
- vasco 3y agoIt must be tiring to live in absolutes.
- mymusewww 3y agoIt must be whatever to be vague about things.
- mymusewww 3y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI mean, let’s start here. Communication and self control. Would pick literally any of the Fortune 100 as exceeding this threshold.
- samspenc 3y ago'Only a Sith deals in absolutes' - Obi Wan to Anakin
- sterlind 3y agoisn't that an absolute too, though?
- leesec 3y agoIf it's so easy you should go become one.
- neom 3y agoJack Dangermond
- api 3y agoAs with engineering: “if it looks easy, you don’t know much about it.”
- chollida1 3y agoSataya Nadalla Mark Benioff Reed Hastings Warren Buffet Jensen Huang Jamie Dimon Benard Arnualt Mary Bara Safra Catz David I. McKay How many do you want? The world is full of talented CEO's. I can't claim to know all the CEO's around the world but the above have all been exceedingly good over their terms. Whose on your list?
- denverllc 3y agoIf I were an OpenA employee, I too would come out for Sam Altman. Why? The board was reckless. They couldn’t point to anything that he had done to warrant this, and went radio silent after their decision. Sam seems shrewd. I know the value of my shares will go up with him. So I’d vote for him. That wouldn’t mean I like him or support him, just that I’d be voting in my own best interest.
- akamaka 3y agoI would be incredibly embarrassed about this if I were an OpenAI employee. Instead of making a statement of the broader principles they stand for and supporting a process of reconciling the differences between the board of directors, they abandoned any independence and rushed to daddy Microsoft to fix the problem for them.
- maxglute 3y ago> I know the value of my shares will go up with him. I haven't followed the situation as closely as others, but it does seem like board structured to not have 7 figure cheques to undermine safety incentive seemingly willing to let openAI burn out of dogma. Employees want their 7 figure cheques, their interests aligned with larger powers with 10 figures on the line. Reporting so far have felt biased accordingly.
- iwontberude 3y agoIf the employees truly came together to collectively bargain why wouldn’t they unionize at the same time to protect against similar abuses by the board in the future?
- voxic11 3y agoThis collective action seems like it was effective enough and achieved its stated goals. Why introduce yet another permanent layer of bureaucracy and politics at your company if you can achieve your goals without it?
- Normal_gaussian 3y agoWell structured unions have a board seat; this would likely have avoided this issue in the first place. This action, by both the board and the employees, is the result of poor communication. It has caused non-trivial damage to the organisation, internally and externally. It is highly desirable for everyone involved for this level of disruption not to happen again.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ETH_start 3y agoCollective bargaining permanently puts the management and other prospective employees at a disadvantage, with their contract liberty limited by government fiat, as a result of a mandate for the employer to negotiate with the union to the exclusion of all other parties. It is generally associated with less performant companies, which is not in the interests of those employed in a rapidly growing company.
- dasmascusstuui 3y ago[dead]
- whalesalad 3y agoThe line about Asperger’s is hysterical. I can’t wait for this insanity to die down and go back to normal. During these frenzied moments we almost need a forked HN homepage where the trend of the month is cordoned off to prevent contagion.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI had a colleague that people assumed was on the autism spectrum, this somehow came up years later over drinks to which he responded "maybe I should ask my doctor, I always assumed I was just an asshole"
- whalesalad 3y agoIf a lot of people think you are autistic, chances are you are autistic. It's a spectrum. We've all got a lil bit of that going on. Some more than others, particularly in our ecosystem.
- sctb 3y ago> It's a spectrum. We've all got a lil bit of that going on. I apologize for the specificity of the nit I'm about to pick, but the "spectrum" part of Autism Spectrum Disorder does not mean that every person is on it! ASD has very specific diagnostic criteria (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html) according to which an individual is either diagnosed with ASD or not.
- whalesalad 3y agoNothing is black or white. The DSM-V especially is not the end-all be-all. It's old as hell. Look back in recent history - every few years we gain completely new understanding on a disorder such as BPD and completely change the meaning. We really know nothing about mental illness. Getting a "diagnosis" is just for insurance and billing purposes. It's a way to map yourself into the legal framework of society. It ultimately is meaningless in the grand scheme of the real world. If you have 95% of the symptoms of autism, but not 100%, what does that mean? Sorry get fucked you're not autistic. You're close, but not quite! See you in six months. At the end of the day the treatment path will be the same (ie, there is none, learn to accept yourself and manage your neurodivergence like the rest of us)
- jrussino 3y agoFrom the article: > Two YC partners sat Altman down last year “and told him, ‘Slow down, chill out!’ ” another partner, Jonathan Levy, told me. “Sam said, ‘Yes, you’re right!’—and went off and did something else on the side that we didn’t know about for a while.” Seems consistent with the original "leadership transition" announcement: > Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board Has any more detail surfaced since then about what specific information he (allegedly) withheld from the board?
- RyanShook 3y agoOne of the leading theories right now is he was talking with leaders in UAE about an AI hardware/chip project without board’s knowledge. I hope some of the previous board members make a statement because it’s been almost a week and still nothing really adds up.
- potatopatch 3y agoThey've been very careful not to and they were obviously right. They were very clearly mobbed by those who benefit from for-profit side which has more power and will determine what has to happen and how to make sure he can run a profit driven company that violates US law except on paper. The funny part is that this means there is no commercial board looking out for interests like those of stock holders, so the stock holders have basically put themselves in the position the board was in AFA no recourse if the CEO is selecting another interest over theirs as well. They want to know what the board knows but don't want the stock price to reflect it.
- gwern 3y agoOne thing that has surfaced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372451
- upwardbound 3y agoOne of the theories circulating is that he engaged in willful copyright infringement, and may have had advance knowledge of this pending lawsuit. https://www.semafor.com/article/11/21/2023/openai-microsoft-sued-for-copyright-infringement-in-new-class-action-lawsuit https://www.semafor.com/article/11/21/2023/openai-microsoft-...
- pk-protect-ai 3y agoThe symptoms described in the article are not actually those of Asperger's; they are more closely related to sociopathy.
- gumballindie 3y ago[flagged]
- idlewords 3y agoScurvy!
- schoen 3y agoI spent longer than I would like trying to figure out your clever joke here. But it turns out that you actually meant the disease, scurvy... that Sam Altman contracted a little over a decade ago, according to the article.
- nikolay 3y agoI had to doublecheck if this is more than just vitamin C deficiency. But, anyway, it is not a result of hard work, but of a poor diet [0]. Stress actually makes your thyroid hypo, not hyper [1]. [0]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24318-scurvy https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24318-scurvy [1]: https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/thyroid-disorders/how-does-stress-affect-hypothyroidism https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/thyroid-disorders/ho...
- activitypea 3y agoUnfortunately for Sam Altman, an LLM will never produce anything half as funny as a bunch of rich VC guys calling a "politics expert" to tell them who to vote for. The human spirit prevails.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lelag 3y ago> After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. He must have felt pretty vindicated about his prepper's stance when COVID happened five years after this statement.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Trombone12 3y agoWhy? Covid-19 was a natural spillover, not a "synthetic virus". If he does feel vindicated he's a straight up loony conspiracy theorist.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoevidence you base this on? I don't have an opinion, but am curious. I ask because there were released US NIH emails discussing a base sequence not close to any in natural sequences, and concern it was in fact synthesized under the "gain of function" funding provided to Wuhan from the NIH. Obliquely related : https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
- nemo 3y agoPlease do not drag in unrelated, tangential threads, especially flame-bait material like this. Regardless of what you believe about the original topic, dragging this into totally unrelated threads only creates problems and is a disruptive behavior.
- bartread 3y agoI mean, the parent of the person you're responded to made what is an increasingly shaky claim that COVID-19 was due to "natural spillover". I don't necessarily think it's wrong that that comment shouldn't be allowed to pass without challenge. I'm not sure we're ever going to know the real origins of COVID-19.